Square… It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again!

by Russ Jones | Dec 14, 2011

How does disruption happen in mature industries? Clayton Christensen famously wrote about this phenomenon in his classic book “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” Most commonly, the new disruptor enters from below – by providing new capabilities to those unserved by...

Yep, It’s Hip to Be Square!

by scott | Apr 27, 2011

Some 17 months ago, I wrote a post here titled “It’s Hip to Be Square” following the launch of Jack Dorsey’s then new company. At the time I wrote:Square seems to be aiming at democratizing merchant card acceptance for physical face-to-face...

Innovations in Card Acceptance

by scott | Jan 22, 2011

What Drives Innovation? More often than not, the successful innovations that surprise us come from disrupters who focus in a laser-like way on unserved market opportunities. In doing so, they are able to successfully fly below the radar of the incumbents (to use...

The Card Payments Ecosystem – and Fragmentation

by scott | Jul 10, 2010

In a post titled “Great since day one”, Marco Arment blogs about what makes the iPhone different – in essence he writes that Apple makes products that are great today. Android isn’t.Reading his post brought to mind the fragmented nature of the...

Glenbrook’s Perspective on Visa’s Acquisition of CyberSource

by formadaadmin | Apr 21, 2010

A number of us self-proclaimed “payments geeks” awoke this morning to learn of Visa Inc’s intention to purchase CyberSource for approximately $2 billion.  Over the course of the day, Glenbrook’s been getting a flood of emails generally asking, “What’s the REAL reason...